Elly de la Cruz: The Global Supernova Redeeming Baseball One 450-Foot Triple at a Time

Elly de la Cruz: The 21-Year-Old Who Made Baseball Cosmopolitan Again (and Other Delusions of Grandeur)
By Our Man in Every Airport Lounge at Once

If you mention Elly de la Cruz in Santo Domingo, a taxi driver will quote exit velocity before the meter starts. Say the name in Seoul and a K-pop producer Googles whether the kid can dance—because if he can, there’s money in it. Whisper it in a Swiss boardroom and a risk manager recalculates the Cincinnati Reds’ market cap the way medieval monks updated indulgence prices. The planet, it turns out, still has room for one more folk hero, provided he can turn on a 101-mph fastball and do it with the nonchalant cruelty of a cat flicking a mouse into traffic.

Baseball has long marketed itself as “America’s Pastime,” a phrase that now sounds like a nostalgic euphemism for dial-up internet. Yet De la Cruz’s 2023 arrival—like a meteor landing on a putting green—has done the impossible: made the sport internationally sexy without the help of a Netflix docuseries or a crypto sponsorship. In Japan, they splice his swing into anime. In Venezuela, bus drivers name their vehicles “Elly Express” and hope the transmission lasts longer than the bolívar. Even the British, who traditionally treat baseball the way they treat emotional vulnerability, paused a cricket commentary to watch him leg out a 450-foot triple, an act so statistically absurd it registers as performance art.

The global implications, naturally, are being overblown by every content farm from Silicon Valley to Silicon Roundabout. MLB’s central office now floats PowerPoints titled “The De la Cruz Emerging-Market Inflection Point,” which is corporate for: maybe we can sell caps in Lagos. The league has dispatched envoys to the Dominican Republic loaded with translation apps and gift bags, forgetting that the DR already exports baseball players the way France exports disdain. Meanwhile, sneaker companies are locked in a Cold-War-style arms race to secure his feet, a phrase that sounds dystopian only until you see the stock price of whichever conglomerate wins. Economists—those reliable carnival barkers—claim a De la Cruz championship run could add “between 0.2 and 0.4 percent” to U.S. third-quarter GDP, a margin of error so comically wide it could also account for alien invasion.

But the darker joke is on us, the spectators. We demand narratives: the kid from Sabana Iglesia who once swung a broomstick at bottle caps now makes millionaires look like they’re fighting bees in a phone booth. It’s Horatio Alger with exit velocity. Yet behind every highlight reel is a reminder that baseball remains a cartel of 30 owners who treat labor like avocados—buy low, sell guacamole. De la Cruz’s league-minimum salary wouldn’t cover the catering budget for a Saudi sovereign-wealth fund takeover, and if he tears an oblique tomorrow, the same front office will DHL him to rehab like defective merchandise. The global economy cheers, then forgets, faster than you can say “Fernando Valenzuela.”

Still, there is something stubbornly life-affirming about a 6-foot-2 shortstop who can throw 98 across the diamond with the casual flick of a man tossing car keys. In a world busy monetizing every breath, De la Cruz still breathes at full lung capacity. Watch him round second base and you remember why humans invented clocks—to measure the seconds before wonder expires.

So, for the moment, the planet tilts slightly on its axis every time Elly De la Cruz swings. Children from Caracas to Copenhagen mimic the leg kick in living rooms, probably knocking over furniture and parental expectations. Diplomats pretend not to notice when bilateral trade talks derail because someone queued up last night’s opposite-field missile on a loop. And in the executive suites, men who’ve never sweated through a polyester uniform calculate how to bottle lightning before the storm moves on.

The forecast, by the way, calls for thunder for at least the next decade—unless the accountants get to it first. In which case we’ll all go back to pretending that spreadsheets, not shortstops, make the world go round.